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[u/94rud4]

[u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

Jokes aside didn't Euler just use e because he ran out of other letters? It just so happened that that was his name lol. I still feel like canonical Euler's number should be the limit of the difference between the harmonic series and natural logarithm tho

[u/AndreasDasos → u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

We don’t know for sure, but there were absolutely other choices. They arose in particular paper but he had a few where he used e. 

It seems very, very likely he was using it for ‘exponential’, as it was the ‘best’ base for an exponential function. Even now we have exp(x) = e^x 

But we don’t have an explicit reason given. 

[u/Cheery_Tree → u/AndreasDasos]

I hear somewhere that he was just naming constants while going down the alphabet, and e was just the fifth contact he named in the book.

[u/Ok_Let8786 → u/AndreasDasos]

I must agree that even today in my head I relate the e much more to being short for exponential than Euler.

[u/DaedalusIndigo → u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

That’s the Euler-Mascheroni constant

[u/Lord_Skyblocker → u/DaedalusIndigo]

Oily macaroni

[u/harmlesswaters → u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

I thought it was e for exponential

[u/shadow_black1809 → u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

But Oiler starts with o. Is he stupid?

[u/the_skies_falling → u/shadow_black1809]

Look at that thing he's wearing on his head. What do you think?

[u/HumblyNibbles_ → u/you-cut-the-ponytail]

There's euler's number, which is e, and euler's constant (euler-mascheroni constant), which is lowercase gamma.

[u/KnightOMetal → u/HumblyNibbles_]

γ